Bit of a Blur

by Alex James

  I distinctly remember hearing Claire say, ‘I don’t WANT to go in the bath. I want some DRUGS. I want some drugs right NOW. GIVE ME SOME DRUGS!’ She’d been in the ‘birthing pool’ for hours and hours and nothing was budging. More and more people arrived and the lights got brighter. It was definitely all moving away from the calm candlelit herbal scenario we’d been working on. It was four o’clock in the morning when the obstetrician arrived, big, black, smiling and wearing an Arsenal top.

  There is a part of everyone that recoils at the thought of seeing their loved one up on the jacks being poked around by a rubber-gloved gooner. Some fathers choose not to be at the birth of their children; it’s quite a trend. Some mothers prefer to have their super best friend as a ‘birthing partner’. I couldn’t have missed it. I was down at the business end gawping and crying. The baby was stuck in the birth canal, and a medieval-looking contraption called a ventouse, a kind of plunger like you’d use for sorting out a blocked sink, was squidged on to the little head somewhere on the other side of Claire. She was huffing and puffing, and the gooner was working up quite a sweat, too, as he pulled and heaved on the end of the plunger in the bright lights. It was hard, physical toil, like a strange tug of war. Some of the people were cheering on Claire’s team. ‘PUSH, CLAIRE, GO ON, GOOD GIRL!’ I was with the doctor. ‘PULL, PULL, NOW! NOW! COME ON THE ARSENAL!’ By the time they’d separated, the baby had a cone-shaped head. He was covered in goo and was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. No one’s ever ready for that feeling.

  Building

  The new house didn’t look in too bad shape. We thought we’d strip the wallpaper, redecorate, live in it for a while and modernise when the right time came. A lot of plaster seemed to be coming off with the wallpaper, so we took off some of the plaster. The walls were damp. With the walls exposed, you could see that some of the beams were rotten. The beams were rotten because the roof was leaking. So the roof had to come off. By this time it was obvious that the plumbing could do with an immediate overhaul and the electrics needed a good looking at. Old houses are like that. I’d dealt with builders and architects before, in London. Architects are a discrete genus of the species of Homo sapiens. To be a successful architect requires a similar mesmeric charm that is the bread and butter of the film director, the television evangelist, the hypnotist and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. They arrive with their little satchels and their propelling pencils. Everything about them says calm; from the crisp white sheets of paper they use to cast their spells, to their supernatural patience. They retreat, taking your dreams with them in that little satchel, and return with goblins, pixies and demigods who turn your house into dust. If all goes well you live happily ever after, but the plot thickens and takes unexpected twists along the way. People who’ve had babies bang on and on about what hard work it is. Having had a baby and builders at the same time, I’d say that builders are harder work, but I wouldn’t bang on and on about it. Other people’s builders are even less interesting than other people’s babies.

  Building wasn’t something I’d ever viewed as a particularly creative process, not like art or music. Art and music happen in your mind and live there. Building, when you’re able to build anything you like, starts in your mind and then you live there. Artists and musicians enjoy a cachet that eludes the builder, but I’m starting to think that building is the most primal and satisfying of all the creative urges. As a steel beam was being craned into place, I turned to the structural engineer and said, ‘I guess it’s sculpture really, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s not what we facking call it, mate! Hur, hur, hur.’

  It’s easy for your dreams to run away with you, but, when all is said and done, a house is just a house. A home is something else and I gradually realised I had one. Even when it was mainly a building site it was where I wanted to be. We lived in the chaos with an ancient cooker and an open fire, doing nothing at all whenever we could. I didn’t want to go anywhere else. I’d landed.

  I bought a digger. There was a huge area of concrete behind the house, about an acre, I think. I’m not sure if anybody actually knows how big an acre is. I’ve never been able to find out for sure. The area it covered was bigger than a football pitch and smaller than a cricket pitch. It was for making silage on. Silage is what cattle eat in the winter, fermented grass. I couldn’t see us needing quite that much silage ever, so I bulldozed the whole lot and a machine as big as a ship came and crunched it all into little pieces. Bulldozing concrete is about the closest feeling you can get to playing the bass in a rock and roll band. They are connected.

  Now I was a builder again, like I had been when I failed my ‘A’ levels. When I worked on building sites, I dreamed about being in a band and the band was playing to huge crowds. I always knew it would happen, I just didn’t realise when it did that I’d be onstage dreaming I was on a building site.

  There is always someone banging something somewhere on a farm. It’s a kind of heartbeat, and it’s as natural as the sound of a cock crowing.

  There was a point when I realised that ‘farm’ is just another word for ‘building site’. A farm is a process, a continuous cycle. There is no conclusion. There were piles of manure, piles of rubble, a mountain of crunched concrete, heaps of wood, all kinds of stuff in mounds. My first inclination was to get rid of the piles and clear the place up, but piles are a farm’s vital organs. Some of the piles grew and some shrunk, but they were all being fed and milked, it seemed. I soon started to collect piles and talk about them and, indeed, to them.

  We bought a couple of thousand sheep. Sheep are a good place to start. They are easy to look after and they don’t need any expensive equipment, not like babies.

  Singing

  My granny didn’t believe that we’d called our baby Geronimo. She kept asking what his name really was. I said that sometimes we called him Big Ears, and sometimes we called him Skippy, but his name was definitely Geronimo, and he wore it well. His first word was ‘digger’ which rang nicely with my new sense of purpose.

  I saw the advert for the singing group in the doctor’s surgery. While being weighed, Geronimo had scored a direct hit on the health visitor’s slacks with a vigorous spray of baby wee. They really hate that, health visitors. They say, ‘It’s all right, happens all the time’, but it sours the atmosphere. Then he’d had his latest injections and he’d screamed and screamed at the nurse. Until then, I’d thought trumpets were the loudest thing in the world. It’s got something to do with their range. Trumpets play in the same register as shouts and screams. The Red Arrows taking off, or standing onstage at Glastonbury, sandwiched between towers of amplifiers and a hollering multitude, doesn’t give you quite the same impression of loudness as being in the same room as one other person who is playing a trumpet. And trumpets don’t get near to babies on the perceived loudness scale. It’s got nothing to do with decibels. There is something very subjective about the ear’s response to babies screaming.

  We’d suffered a punctured dummy at Tesco a couple of weeks earlier and he’d gone into paroxysms of anguish. I figured that being deprived of his binky for an hour or two would do him good, toughen him up a bit. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be really, really famous, try pushing a screaming baby around a supermarket for a few minutes. You look up and all eyes are on you. People stop what they’re doing and stare at you; they ask you if you’re all right, they nudge and point, they interfere. ‘No, he’s fine, he’s absolutely fine,’ I’d said. But they weren’t buying it. My nonchalance made them more concerned. Some had started to follow us and by the time we’d got to the beans aisle we had to abort the mission.

  The surgery was full of screams here and wee there, and I was evacuating as swiftly as possible. I was halfway out of the door when I saw a little card pinned to the wall advertising a singing group for mums and babies. I paused to take down the number, avoiding the collective gaze of the waiting room.

  I assumed they meant dads as well as mums. I arrived slig
htly late at the village hall, but I stood outside suddenly finding the need to pluck up courage. I was never nervous about going onstage or talking to rocket scientists on live television. I wasn’t fazed by Hollywood starlets or foozled by bullying billionaires. But I felt nervous now. Even when I picked up my guitar and sang Joe Strummer a melody I’d written for him it hadn’t been this bad. I was terrified. I was about to tiptoe into the delicate skein of the real world and I hadn’t been there for years.

  When I got through the door the mums were singing a song about shaking a parachute, and shaking a parachute. Some babies were crawling around. Some were under the parachute laughing and some were trying to break things and fight each other. It’s invigorating to observe babies en masse.

  The unaccompanied sound of mothers gently singing to their little children is the sweetest music I’ve ever heard. I was the only dad there. It was like being back in the French department at college, another matriarchal super-civilisation.

  A lot of the well-known nursery rhymes are folk tunes as old as the hills. They’re a part of the human condition, and they lift the spirits like love in the morning. We sang ‘Giddy-up horsey’, did more parachute shaking, then there was one I’d never heard involving lions and rivers. The hits kept coming, though. I think it’s the best band I’ve ever been in.

  I became more and more engrossed, messing around in the parish. The more things I did, the more other things suggested themselves. It felt like I was in the right place. My usual response to being told ‘There is a TV crew at the door’ is to panic. The news media only normally hound you because some heinous escapade has come to light or something nasty is brewing. It’s never normally a good sign, even if it does make the cleaner feel glamorous. There were actually two TV crews and a Sunday Times journalist in attendance by the time I got to the front door. They were all smiling, though. They took it in turns to explain that our tiny, local rural community had been voted ‘England’s Finest Village’ by Country Life magazine.

  Not since arriving in Japan for the first time, poor and practically destitute, to be overwhelmed by fanatical fans at the airport, had I felt quite so ridiculous as I did now in this Cotswolds village. Being big in Japan wasn’t something I’d ever bargained for. It was just a huge slice of luck that Japan existed at all and that its people wanted to buy our records and give us presents. I had the same feeling of outrageous good fortune now as it became clear that somehow we’d landed on our feet.

  Of course the notion of the best village in the country is just a bit of harmless nonsense. In fact, it made our neighbourhood the scourge of the shire. The surrounding villages, some of which have a nicer duck pond and better preserved stocks, a higher-ranking celebrity resident or less low-cost housing, were unified in their disapproval. But I felt vindicated. When we were in the process of buying the farm, almost everybody I knew had sought a quiet word with me. They all expressed their concerns about my buying a random tumbledown ruin in the middle of nowhere. It had bewildered people and now it suddenly looked like a pretty neat trick.

  Gardens

  I don’t know how much sense it would make to live in the country if I wasn’t married. Cities are distracting, erotic places, but love flows uninterrupted in the countryside. I suppose that’s why we moved here, because we wanted to be together. That’s the best thing about living in the country, being in a world of your own with the person you love. I was never happier than when sailing on the random breeze of fortune, but now I was settled. I still wanted to travel, but in order to travel, rather than drift, I need a home. Some people have lots of houses, but you can only really have one home, somewhere that you long to be when you’re not there, somewhere in which you can happily do nothing at all, where all your things are.

  I had been nocturnal for many years. Cities only really come alive at night; that’s when all the good stuff happens. The great outdoors flourishes in the sunshine and the pleasures of the countryside are subtle and lasting, rather than short and sweet. All happy endings imply gardens. That’s just the way it is.

  I had been a vegetarian for twenty years. I’d fought my way around the restaurants of the world, sending things back that had bacon sprinkled on them or chicken stock in them, enduring many a plate of overboiled vegetables, and the disdain of proud chefs everywhere. Japan was the most difficult place to fulfil the vegetarian dream. I had taken special training to make sure I could order vegetarian food in Japan, but it’s complicated. Vegetarianism is just not a notion to the Japanese. You have to explain the whole concept, every time you order a bowl of noodles. Still, more often than not it would be a disaster. ‘I’m sure this is fish,’ I said to the girl from the record label, holding up a morsel with my chopsticks. ‘No, not fish,’ she said. ‘What is it then?’ ‘Is made from fish. Is not fish.’ It was hopeless.

  I think my vegetarianism stemmed from a wish to take a benevolent but passive role in nature. That role changed when we moved to the farm. You can’t be a passive farmer. I had no idea what was going on. It was two hundred acres of unknowns. I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t found Paddy. Paddy is a kind of farming adviser called a land agent. It’s the equivalent of a manager in showbusiness, or, probably more accurately, someone who you pay to be your dad. Paddy walked all over the land with us, inspecting fences, hedges, ditches, weed infestation levels. He appraised the state of the roofs and gutters around the farmyard, he applied for grants, he told me to see so and so about such and such. He took care of the business, and I learned a lot from him very quickly. He said we had to do something about the rooks. They were taking over. Rooks eat all the other birds’ eggs, so unless you keep them under control you end up with just rooks. The West End is teeming with rodents. There were heart-stopping rats bigger than cats in Endell Street. Mercer Street was more mouse and pigeon territory. Rentokil would come and put their traps down and that would take care of it, but there’s no easy way to deal with rooks. The only way to control them is to shoot them. It was a difficult situation for a vegetarian. In the end I resigned myself to the fact that you’re being a lot more benevolent with a twelve-bore than you are when you order the nut roast. It was a short step from whacking rooks to munching on a bacon sandwich.

  It was the final step in a complete volte-face. I didn’t recognise myself any more. It only seemed like a minute ago that I was the number one slag in the Groucho Club, a boozy lascivious metropolitan vampire pacifist with too many friends. Here I was early in the morning, fresh from kippers with my wife, standing in a field alone with a shotgun. I let ’em ’ave it.

  Beagle II

  It was our first Christmas on the farm, 2003. Beagle was due to land on Isidis Planitia, a flat and relatively friendly part of Mars, early on Christmas morning. There was a media centre in London that had satellite links with mission control in Darmstadt. I drove up to London with my dad in the dead of night. We got there in an hour. Naturally, Colin Pillinger and his wife and the whole Beagle team were there. There were journalists, TV crews and one or two interested public figures. Everett Gibson, from NASA, was there, still showing everyone his meteorite. There were mince pies and crackers and the atmosphere was more than festive. It was tense, very exciting - the story of Beagle had become a media phenomenon. There was massive popular support for the sideburned swashbuckler and his spaceship.

  We knew the lander had separated successfully from Mars Express, the mother ship, and was spinning its way towards the Martian surface. It was hard to believe it was happening. ‘Parachutes should have opened,’ said Colin. The whole room was silent. The whole city was silent. It was Christmas morning after all. I formed a mental picture of the chutes opening in the thin Martian atmosphere and the tiny machine that was taking us further into the space age. There was a lot riding on it as it hurtled, red-hot, supersonic, towards the virgin landscape. What might happen? What might we know this time tomorrow? Money, reputations, years of hard work were suspended from those remote gossamer parachutes.


  Ten seconds to impact. Colin was talking to mission control on a headset. He’d been addressing the room, but now his attention was with them. We were holding our breath, waiting to hear the musical call sign that indicated Beagle had landed and was functioning. But there was no signal. It never came.

  I still think Beagle was a success, in many ways. It was a triumph of aspiration, if not a victory for science. The world doesn’t leap forward by committee. It needs leaders. It needs leaders with big sideburns.

  Queen

  I jumped in a taxi on Oxford Street. ‘Buckingham Palace!’ I said, became aware of what I’d said and laughed out loud. I was often saying, ‘Follow that car’, and even, ‘Lose the car behind us’ wasn’t unusual, but I’d never said ‘Buckingham Palace’ to a taxi driver before. I thought he might have had more to say about it. He merely declared solemnly that Marble Arch was completely solid. For a moment I thought he was attempting some spontaneous architectural criticism, but he was referring to the traffic and not to the monolithic, eternal qualities of the structure itself. We picked our way swiftly and silently through the magic maze of Mayfair, eluding the petrified chaos of the main roads.